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Popular web APIs you should know about

Alexandru-Dan Pop on July 22, 2020

It's no secret, APIs are becoming more and more relevant for each software company. It is pretty common that the offering or product of a company i...

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Wayne Smallman • Jul 22 '20

Weird this article should come up after I did some MailChimp API integration last night.

I'm also using Google's Natural Language API, and the YouTube API, both in Node, and have found both — and the one for MailChimp — to be be simple and straightforward.

Alexandru-Dan Pop • Jul 22 '20

Nice stuff! What are you using the Google's Natural Language API for? Extracting speech as text, or even trying to find out more sophisticated things like sentiment?

I think once you get your hands on a few APIs and use them, they become pretty easy to use.

Wayne Smallman • Jul 22 '20 • Edited

At the moment, the NLP work is experimental, but the idea is:

user saves a web page;
choses to analyze the page via NLP;
user chooses which entities (and sentiment, at some point) to save.

The entities are saved into a nested object in the document for the web page in Elastic, giving it extra value in terms of its search score, should the search phrase match.

But this is part of something much more ambitious I have in mind for the long-term development of the Under Cloud, assuming I have time to learn Machine Learning!

Alexandru-Dan Pop • Jul 22 '20

Very cool idea, good luck!

Max Ong Zong Bao • Jul 23 '20

I'll add a few more:

News API - A Google API that provides you the news from various news media.
Whats3Word - Provides you a 3 words location based upon your GPS coordinates which makes it easy to share your location.

Alexandru-Dan Pop • Jul 23 '20

Thanks for the additional resources!

Max Ong Zong Bao • Jul 23 '20

Glad to help :)

Annie Taylor Chen • Jul 22 '20

Interesting I already used some of those...such as Algolia, really awesome but quite expensive 😢 would love to explore some AIs ones in personal projects! Do they have some free tier for developers to play with?

Alexandru-Dan Pop • Jul 22 '20 • Edited

Yes! Azure Cognitive services and the Google AI APIs can be used for free to some extent. Not sure of IBM Watson.

Matthew Schwartz • Jul 23 '20

I run a very specialized API that returns social sentiment of stocks.

Jose Gabriel Companioni Benitez • Jul 22 '20

I think this is a great article. I recently started working on web apps and I have only used MapBox API, but now I know there are lot of APIs available out there. Thanks a lot

roikra • Feb 8 '21

I'll add another one:
usearch.com/
Full access to the world's 3rd largest search engine.

Alexandru-Dan Pop • Jul 22 '20

Haven't tried it to be honest. Do you see a cool use case for it? I think there's already lots of apps leveraging the twitter api for cross-posting or things like that.